As I have always been known for, if something needs to be fixed I will almost always get asked to do it. Everytime I went home or to my friends houses I was inevitably asked to fix something. So i decided to use up the spare carry case I had and build my “ultimate” go kit with all the basics I would need to fix most things.
The list of things that it needed to have was long and I didn’t have much space so I had to get creative with tools and try find some miniature versions of tools I might need:
Tape measure
Phillips #2
Flathead
Stanley knife
Led Torch
Scissors
Side cutters
Pliers
Metric allen keys
Micro precision screw driver set
Metric 3/8 socket set
Duct tape
Electrical tape
Multi meter
Dremel gas torch
Straight knife
Pen and pencil
Permanent marker
Plastic pry tool
Wheel security key
Spare car bulbs
Cable ties
Mini wd40
I did a rough layout of all the tools I needed before I found some way of holding them in place.
Foam cutting
The next part was extremely tedious. I found some 5-7cm medium density foam and got a long thin craft knife blade and cut out the shape of each tool. This part was hard to get right and some of the tools are a bit loose, i think I would have liked to have found some denser foam to to hold the tools better but it serves its purpose for now.
Car fitment
It actually took me a long time to realise this case would just fit in the behind the drivers seat glovebox of a 350z. It is almost perfectly made for it and now whenever I go to friends or family houses I will always have the bare essentials I need to fix any issue.
Another addition to the modded collection, are these two 1970’s National Panasonic portable radios I saved from the tip in my poppas shed ( the shed has been a wealth of projects ). Since both of these seemed to be in okay condition cosmetically, I thought it would be a great project to mod them for bluetooth! Some criteria I had for the project was; they had to look the same on the outside, they had to have bluetooth ( obviously ), they had to retain their original functionality and they had to be rechargeable as I wasn’t going to be buying D-Cell batteries every time it went flat.
Planning and ordering
Once I knew what I wanted I got to looking at suitable modules and electronics I needed. I ended up settling on some 5V bluetooth modules like this or this, my ones aren’t available anymore but they look and act the same as these do. 5V 3Wx2 and Bluetooth. As for power, I found some 5V 1A USB 18650 charger boards like this or this that would regulate the 5V from the Lipstick Power Banks like these or these that would fit in the battery compartments.
Wiring and mounting
The wiring up of everything wasn’t actually too hard, just a matter or find all the power, ground and speaker points to intersect. One thing I did do was connect in a slider switch and mounted it on the side of the unit to change between the original radio and the new bluetooth unit, to hopefully stop as much interference as possible. It works but switching the power for each. The original power switch on the volume knobs is retained in both.
Getting the parts mounted was just a matter of fitting it all in the right spot with industrial 3M tape and hot glue, once that stuff sticks its there for good. I did gut the battery holder in one of them to be able to mount the lip stick power bank and power/charger board. This meant I could disconnect the power when it wasn’t in use and also be able to plug it in to be charged. The other unit doesn’t have this access so the back has to come off, I should externally mod that one to charge from the outside and have a battery disconnect.
Power Filtering/cleaning
One problem that I ran into after powering them up was a really bad hum from the batteries, it seems they weren’t designed to drive audio amplifiers ( who knew?! ) so the power was really dirty. Andy Brown’s website was critical in getting a 5V usb filtering circuit made up to get around this issue and did it what. the unit was almost silent once I added this mod in.
From the outside, you would never know these were modded. Was good to give these units a little extra life as the radio frequencies they use no longer exist so they were destined for the tip.
When I was going through and cleaning my poppa’s shed, I came across some old hand planes in bad condition that I knew nobody else in the family would get it or care about them, so I was determined to bring them back to life and add them to my tool set ( I actually used them on my desk build to flatten the tops out ).
The planes were in pretty average condition, paint all over them, rusty AF and the cutting edge was very blunt, chipped and not even straight. Once I broke the planes down I realised my poppa use to sharpen them with the bench grinder, very obvious by the curve in the cutting edge.
Breaking down the planes, cleaning and sharpening
Dismantling the planes was relatively easy other than some stubborn bolts. I did have to glue some of the handle bits up to get a crack to close up before I could reassemble. Once they were broken down, I soaked everything in a bath of white vinegar to get all the rust of the parts. You can see the difference in what the vinegar does.
After I had the parts all cleaned, it was time to sharpen the blades. Because I had no idea where they were at, what angle it was ground to, how flat it was etc I decided to grind everything flat first and make the leading edge as straight as possible. You need to flatten the top and bottom first before you attempt to put an edge on it otherwise it will never get sharp enough and it will cut funny.
I basically got trapped in a Youtube hole watching Paul Sellers videos after watching this one below. It gives you the basics of getting the Planes ready to use. He goes through sharpening and setting up the planes.
Here is how my blades turned out, razor sharp and passes the paper test.
Final turnout
For my average skill level, these planes turned out great and are now actually usable for projects! I repainted the black interiors of them and sanded and stained the handles with Linseed oil to treat them. Gave them a generous covering of machine oil to stop them rusting and they are ready for another lifetime of use.
With my growing obsession with retro gaming and I started getting interested in Sony’s classic portable gaming system again, the PSP. I always had consoles as a kid and teenager and even still had some PSP parts from back in the day, including the blue PSP1000 that my sisters had as a kid, with the original box. But as I always do I ended up getting a lot more of them than I needed. The idea was to have a collection with an example of each model. In the end, I ended up with 5 consoles, 1x PSP1000, 2x PSP2000 and 2x PSP3000’s. I also ended up getting a PS Vita down the line and sending off the black PSP to my dad and selling the red one.
Fixing the White PSP
I got the white PSP2000 really cheap as it had a scratched screen. Me in my infinite wisdom thought I could remove the scratches with headlight polisher ( do not do this ). I instead made it exponentially worse and ended up finding genuine Sony replacement faceplates on eBay. I did swap out the screen on one of the PSP3000’s as well but didn’t get any photos of the issue, I believe the screen had lines all through it. As of writing this article, the screens were still available for parts on eBay and AliExpress.
Soft modding the PSP’s
When it came to soft modding the PSP’s I wanted to have the exact same CFW, emulators and roms on all of them so I could side by side compare the units and see the differences. In the end, the biggest difference was the screen brightness of the 3000’s and obvious weight difference from the 1000 series.
As for instructions? Well there are no better instructions that these ones from GBATemp.net. They are super easy to follow, have all the instructions, links and notes you could ever need. For reference and incase the forum ever disappears I am going to also post the instructions here:
Installation Steps 0. Extract and copy /PSP/GAME/ and /seplugins/ folders for (L)CFW and Infinity onto PSP memory card. 1. Update to 6.61. Remove any UMD from the disc drive. Turn off or remove any plugins/.PRXs 2. Place the respective 631.PBP and 661.PBP into the MAKER folder. 3. Install and run PRO or ME (L)CFW (VCFW). 4. Run Infinity Firmware Builder (MAKER folder app). 5. If successful, there will be a DATA.MFC file in the MAKER folder. 6. Copy DATA.MFC to the FLASHER folder. (DATA.MFC is unique for your device. Never use this file on a different PSP.) 7. Run Infinity Firmware Flasher (FLASHER folder app). 8. After this, your device will reboot and you will have Infinity. (An error screen after the process is a sign that it worked.) 9. Re-install PRO or ME (L)CFW (VCFW). 10. Activate the permanent patch in the Infinity Bootloader Configuration; go left (STAGE folder app).
All said and done, they all modded super easy. I used Street Fighter II and RoboCop Vs Terminator as my benchmark for testing. As you can see, the screen colours and brightness are vastly different between the models. When it comes to roms, I highly recommend the “PSP Emulators Bible” thread on Wololo.net. It covers everything you could ever need to know about what emulators to run, how they work, whats best etc.
Modding the PS Vita
For the PS Vita, It was a lot harder to modify. There didn’t seem to be any good written steps at first, but the best instructions came in the form of Youtube videos. I mainly sourced my instructions from the below videos created by Mr Mario 2011, Tech James and Tech Savvy Buyer. I also ended up getting a SD to Vita adapter so that I could load all my physical games and RetroArch roms for when I travel as the Vita is easily the best handheld console.
One thing to note, if the PS Vita refuses to turn on and just has a little orange light on, the battery is too dead to power on, I thought I bricked my unit for a moment. Below is a few pictures of the units all modded and ready for mobile gaming!
Seeing all the Retropie projects online got me looking at how I could put together one of my own but with a bit of a twist. I have seen a few people build a Raspberry Pi RetroPie rig inside a playstation shell before but they always used USB ports on the front for controllers, something I didn’t want to do. For me the main attraction of doing this project was to make it very hard to tell that it was NOT a Playstation PS1, so it had to have PS1 controller ports on the front of it. I opted for gutting/ruining one of the PS1’s I had that had a dodgy eject switch and no RCA outputs on it. I kept all the parts I removed for spares.
Controller ports
Getting the controller ports right was my main concern, everything else was pretty standard RetroPie after that. I found some PS2 to USB adapters on AliExpress that would work perfectly. The idea was to strip back the controller ports and adapters and just join the pins directly, using the PS1 ports that then push through to the Raspberry Pi 3B+ via usb. There was no reason it shouldn’t work, and it did!
Main Unit assembly
After the controllers were working, it was pretty straight forward to get the rest done. I just had to strip the PS1 case down, remove all the standoffs, dremel out the eject area to get the lid to close and then use some of the cut off standoffs to glue back in and mount the Raspberry Pi. The Power supply is actually a PSP power supply mounted in the same spot as the stock one with ALOT of hot glue, the figure 8 power port even lines up with the stock hole in the back! It’s like I was suppose to do this. To get the PS1 power, reset and LED to work, I stripped these off the stock power board and made up a small stripboard to mount it all. In it’s current configuration, the Power button gives the unit power, and turns the LED on and the Reset switch runs a soft shut down script from RetroFlag.The HDMI cable is just a small flexible extender I found in a box at work that I then glued into the case where the standard port would be.
One thing I did notice was that I was getting the little over heating and over voltage icons in the corner of the Pi when running for a while. So I actually dropped the USB cable for the power and connected the power directly to the GPIO pins and upgraded the heat sink to a dual fan setup, it has been fine ever since. A big reason I changed to having a reset switch was I corrupted a couple of installs and even killed a 64GB SD card, so do not just rip out the power of your PI.
From the outside you would never know it was a Raspberry Pi on the inside except for the HDMI port on the back. Here is a side by side of a real PS1.
Software
Everything that runs on this is based on RetroPie. I did change the way my roms loaded by loading them off a USB stick instead of the SD Card, this allows me to update, upgrade my install without transferring all my roms every single time, something I really got sick of by the end of it. As I mentioned above, I did opt for making the reset switch run a soft shut down script from RetroFlag to stop corrupting my SD cards, I just haven’t figured out how I am going to label the outside so people know to do this.
Installing the OS is pretty easy but getting the install just how you like it can take weeks if not months. Personally, I like the tronkyFran theme as it is clean and easy to use for anyone and I recommend ETAPrime for content on how to get the most out of your Pi.
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